Cereal Cropland Percentage of Total Land Area

Land under cereal production measures the harvested area for grains like wheat, rice, and maize as a percentage of a country's total land area. The data excludes crops harvested for hay, green feed, or grazing. It is compiled by the Africa Development Indicators team from World Bank sources.

Use Cases

• Analyze trends in the 'cereal cropland (% of land area)' metric over time to assess agricultural intensification.
• Model the relationship between cereal land use and other development indicators like population density or GDP per capita.
• Compare 'cereal cropland' percentages across countries to identify regions with high dependency on grain production.
• Forecast future 'cereal cropland' requirements based on historical time-series data and population growth projections.

Strengths

• Data covers a standard list of major cereal crops including wheat, rice, maize, barley, oats, rye, millet, sorghum, and buckwheat.
• Provides a focused metric ('% of land area') enabling cross-country and temporal comparability.

Limitations

• Row count, geographic coverage, and temporal range are unspecified.
• Methodological notes indicate some countries may report sown or cultivated area instead of harvested area, introducing potential inconsistency.

Provenance

Source

World Bank, Africa Development Indicators

Collection Method

Aggregated from national reports on harvested area for dry grain cereal production.

Geography

Global country-level coverage implied, but specific countries are not listed.